Matt Waite: How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math

Somewhere in middle school, I had convinced myself that I was bad at math. It was okay: My mom was bad at math too. So were lots of people I looked up to. “Bad at math” was a thing — probably even genetic — and it was okay.

I so thoroughly convinced myself that I was bad at math that I very nearly didn’t graduate from high school. It took tutors and hours a week to squeak through an advanced algebra class my friends had all breezed through on their way to much harder classes.

But it was okay. I was bad at math. They weren’t. Simple as that.

And it was all a lie.

“Bad at math” is a lie you tell yourself to make failure at math hurt less. That’s all it is. Professors Miles Kimball and Noah Smith wrote in The Atlantic that many of us faced a moment in our lives where we entered a math class that some of us were prepared for and some of us weren’t. Those that got it right away were “good at math” and those who didn’t, well, weren’t. Or so we believed. Those who were good kept working to stay good, and those of us who were bad at it believed the lie.

Now, Kimball and Smith write that bad at math is “the most self-destructive idea in America today.”

Well, Professors Kimball and Smith, welcome to journalism, where “bad at math” isn’t just a destructive idea — it’s a badge of honor. It’s your admission to the club. It’s woven into the very fabric of identity as a journalist.

And it’s a destructive lie. One I would say most journalists believe. It’s a lie that may well be a lurking variable in the death of journalism’s institutions.

Name me a hot growth area in journalism and I’ll show you an area in desperate need of people who can do a bit of math. Data. Programming. Visualization. It’s telling that most of the effort now is around recruiting people from outside journalism to do these things.

But it doesn’t end there. Name me a place where journalism needs help, and I’ll show you more places where math is a daily need: analytics, product development, market analysis. All “business side” jobs, right? Not anymore.

Truth is, “bad at math” was never a good thing in journalism, even when things like data and analytics weren’t a part of the job. Covering a city budget? It’s shameful how many newsroom creatures can’t calculate percent change. Covering sports? It’s embarrassing how many sports writers dismiss the gigantic leaps forward in data analysis in all sports as “nerd stuff.”

In short, we’ve created a culture where ignorance of a subject is not only accepted, it’s glorified. Ha ha! Journalists are bad at math! Fire is hot and water is wet too!

I’m not going to tell you how to get good at math by giving you links to online materials or MOOCs or whatever. I’m not. You can Google. You should do that. No, I’m going to tell you a story.

Through grit and luck and a Hail Mary pass of a grade on a final exam, I did graduate from high school. And in 1993 I went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the time said the curricular equivalent of “Math? Why the hell do you need math?” I thought this was great. No math? I must be in heaven.

Twenty years later, I’m now a professor in that same journalism school that let me skip out of math. We don’t do that anymore, but our math requirements are pretty thin and universally reviled by students, most of whom would say they’re bad at math. As a professor, I can take classes for free. And it’s abundantly obvious to me that journalism’s problems aren’t with journalism — they’re about money. Where does one go to learn about money? Business school.

So I thought I would get an MBA to better understand the business side of journalism. I walked over to the business college and told them I wanted to do this. “Have you had calculus as an undergrad?” Oh. Uh, no. “Have to have it. It’s an admission requirement.”

So almost two decades to the day that I set foot on campus, there I was, taking a math placement exam. This exam is given to all incoming freshmen to determine which math class they should start with. I took it and could barely read the questions. If they had given me a grade, I would have bombed it. I tested straight into a remedial math class for students who didn’t get enough in high school. Congrats, Math Department: Your test nailed it.

I probably could have crammed and watched Khan Academy videos for hours, taken it again, and landed in a higher math class. But I would have felt like I cheated my way in. And that would have been terrifying. So, I took the class. Math 100A. Just a 37-year-old professor and 30 or so 18-year-old freshmen. Totally normal; I didn’t stick out at all. The instructor was in first grade when I was last in a math class. She asked me what I was doing there. Told her my story. Her reaction: She was bad at math too, until she got to college. Now, she’s getting a Ph.D. in it.

Given all that, I lived in absolute terror that I wouldn’t do well. I sat in the front row. I asked questions non-stop. I did all the homework. I did extra practice problems. I raised my hand to answer questions so much the instructor asked me to stop. I studied for hours.

And I got an A+. I was shocked. And elated. In spite of the fact that I’m a grownup and should get an A in a remedial course, I was pumped up. I can’t remember my last A in math.

On to the next class. Math 101: College Algebra. Just the name gave me chills. I could barely pass high school algebra; how the hell was I going to handle college algebra? Here I was, a grown man with a family and a house and a job and a resume, sweating bullets and losing sleep about a class freshmen take.

Same plan, same result: Work hard, get A+.

I’m halfway through calculus this semester. I have never in my life worked this hard in a class. I’ve never sat awake at night worrying about a class like I have tossing and turning thinking about how to calculate the derivative of something. I can go speak in front of 1,000 people with less than five minutes of preparation and be downright calm compared to the feeling I have going to take a test.

Right now, I’ve got a B+. And if I walk out of there with it, it’ll easily be the most proud of a grade I’ll ever have been.

Why? Because at this level, I’m seeing the consequences of how a student approaches math. On each test, the median score has been around a high F or a low D. The last test saw more than half the class fail. It’s brutal. Of the 111 students in the class, I’m guessing 70 of them will be taking it again.

The only advantage I have over my classmates? I know exactly how to fail at math: Don’t put any effort in. Blow it off. Do something else. A glass of wine and a rerun of Big Bang Theory kicks the crap out of applications of extrema using derivatives, even if you hate wine and loathe Big Bang Theory.

So do me a favor: Try. Stop with the jokes. Stop telling me, “Oh, I could never do that” when you ask me about math. Because it’s not true. You can. If you try.

You can be good at math.

Matt Waite is a professor of practice at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications. Previously, he was senior news technologist at the St. Petersburg Times, where he was the principal developer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.

This is so inspiring–a heroic effort for great motives. As a copyeditor, I too feel that my colleagues and I should be more mathematically literate.

Jon Drobny

Now if only we can also convince scientists and engineers that they really do need to know how to write well, we’d be set!

Jeremy Kun

Now the obvious followup question: when you look back at algebra problems, do others seem to think that *you* are somehow magically gifted at math? Or, do you find it easy now that you’ve spent all of this effort to pass the class?

It’s funny, but people have actually said that to me. “Wow, you’ve got like a gift or something.” And I have to restrain myself from jumping down their throat saying NO NO NO NO NO there is no magic. It’s all work. It’s all effort. And when students taking those classes ask me for help, I explain to them how to do the work instead of solve the problem. Here’s how you approach the whole idea, not here’s how you plug numbers into your calculator. For me, that was a huge awakening. Math isn’t about plugging in numbers to solve the problem and move on — it’s about logical systems to explain something. Something that in many cases has roots in real life — real applicability. It took 20 years between math classes for me to get that, but it changed everything.

Jeremy Kun

One thing I’ve noticed about people like Kimball and Smith, on the other hand, is that they *still* seem to describe math as “solving for x.” I’m glad you see and explain that it’s much more, that the real point is explaining your reasoning logically. I also think most primary and secondary school education is designed while ignoring this view, and that probably contributes to the myth that certain people are naturally gifted.

melindabyerley

I just want to deeply, deeply thank you for sharing this. I had a very similar experience, worked hard to overcome it and get into a top MBA program and not only that, deliberately majored in finance to make sure I had nailed the concepts. Sacrificed some GPA to do it, but was totally worth it. I think our society lets women off the hook too easily, too. When a little girl doesn’t like math, the parents say, “oh, that’s ok.” It’s as if we expect women to be bad at math. We have to stop letting anyone off the hook with this. Hard work. It builds character.

Gary Kebbel

Great point that journalism needs help in analytics, product development and market analysis. We can either choose to import people who don’t understand journalism’s value in society and democracy, or we can apply our values, ethics, responsibility and mission as we learn the areas where our lack of knowledge is threatening our profession. Let’s be masters of our own fate.

Eric Dodd

Math takes practice. Nobody explained this to me until college.

I went through 12 years of grade school, acing everything except for math, without trying. Another 4 years of college, and I aced everything. Except for statistics. I took that class 3 times, and kept dropping it.

My last semester of college, I took stats again. I had to. If I didn’t pass it, I wouldn’t graduate for another year, because the class was only offered in the spring. I begged a friend for help. He was a math major. I told him I was “bad at math”. He said that was silly. “Everyone’s bad at math, at the beginning. Math is just like juggling, or piano: you suck at it at first. It’s just a bunch of tricks. It’s tricks you do with your brain, not your hands. But you still have to practice.”

So I did. Over and over, stats problems. I would get practice tests, copies of the tests from prior semesters, so forth, and I’d do them. He would check, then I’d do them again. He would explain my mistakes, and I’d do them again. He would change some numbers, and I’d do them again.

I got a B+ in that class. First B+ I’d had in math since third grade.

ScrawnyKayaker

Most working scientists write very well, since that’s a necessity to publish peer-reviewed papers and win extremely competitive grant awards. Currently, only 5 to 8% of NIH grant proposals are funded (that’s one in twenty to about one in twelve, for the journalism students who might find that challenging), so biologists have to have good data AND good writing to make the cut.

ScrawnyKayaker

“I sat in the front row. I asked questions non-stop. I did all the
homework. I did extra practice problems. I raised my hand to answer
questions so much the instructor asked me to stop. I studied for hours.”

But but but that’s drill-and-kill!!!1! If we just change the math
books to have more colors and more verbiage and take out all those scary
equations, all students will learn to love “discovery math.”

/sarcasm

geraldine

How is the ‘bad at math’ meme incubated? I believe it is because arithmetic is forced upon young children at school, most of whom aren’t interested, and therefore aren’t ready. We require them to be receptive and creative whilst at the same time judging them with grades and results. In the case of arithmetic, this judgement is more objective than with other subjects, which makes it all the more devastating

moser

Just anecdotal, but my biologist-engineer wife writes significantly better than I do (philosophy, history) for her peer-reviewed papers because she doesn’t have the same urge to embellish and repeat. Probably not a problem for journalists, but it’s a huge problem if you read academic writing in the liberal arts, where 10 or so pages could be condensed into one.

florenciap

I love graphs and plotting in excel—even aced my stats class in grad school but barely passed math and avoided it like the plague in college. Yet I could never understand why my brothers were good at it and why I sucked so much.

Your article nails it. When other things/subjects come easily to you, the easiest thing to do is brush off the thing that is poses a challenge for you. And that’s exactly what I did for years.

Nick Frank

uhm – the source of success in math is time. Like water carving canyons into rock, thinking about math will wrinkle your brain into expertise.
There’s no difficulty level to it, all it takes is commitment; the math you’re learning is the result of many uninterrupted centuries of man-hours teasing at the minute subtleties of logic – so you’re either walking the path or not

After reading the article it would almost seem insulting if someone were to tell you that you were “naturally good at math”. That kindf of statement instantly discredits the grueling work you’ve put into something that you weren’t particularly fond of and attributes it to something random; something you were born with.

I’m not insulted though. The few times that it’s happened, I understood where they were coming from. They were in the same place I was. I sucked at it. They didn’t. And they were *lucky* not to suck at it. Thus, the gift. Really, I wonder how many people I insulted with the same line of crap for all those years. I wonder if I should go around and apologize to people.

This is the opposite of my story. I studied math and physics at uni, worked as a programmer for years, then decided to pursue journalism in my thirties. I’ve been fighting against the preconception that because I’m good at math I can’t also be creative.

I went back to school to pursue a master’s in multimedia journalism. I finished first in my program from a class of seasoned journalists, photographers, and academics.

The idea that people are segregated into analytical and creative camps is incredibly destructive and limiting. Journalism will only get better as it recognizes the folly of that false dichotomy.

Keep up the good fight!

marquisb

When Sal Khan or Keith Devlin want examples of imprecise writing to illustrate the value of precision in mathematical thinking and writing, where do they turn? Journalism. (see Khan Academy’s video on Correlation and Causality or Devlin’s use of newspaper headlines in Introduction to Mathematical Thinking)
As a J-prof who hears the “I don’t do math” line on an almost daily basis, I see this as one of the biggest problems for journalism education to address. That math is also equated with technology doesn’t help because it’s easy to dismiss as geeky, nerdy stuff that someone else will do.
Math is about clear, precise, hard thinking, and the product of that thinking can be so many things, not least of which is a well-written sentence.

ivanistheone

Part of what makes (re)learning basis math difficult is the lack of math textbooks written for adults. Most math books are either too advanced (assume prior knowledge) or too basic (assume readers are retarded). In both cases, an otherwise intelligent adult with some gaps in their knowledge will get discouraged.

That is why I wrote a math textbook specifically intended for adults. It starts off from the basics (numbers, equations, functions) and proceeds all the way to university level topics like calculus and mechanics.

If you waited to teach arithmetic until people were interested, most of them would be sitting at a bar unable to calculate that Jen’s beer, Dave’s beer and Silu’s beer equals three beers.

ScrawnyKayaker

Richard Florida’s idea of the “creative class” is a good one, since it includes far more than poets and musicians. Good scientists and engineers are often quite creative thinkers (although one can be a journeyman without much creativity), and painters and guitarists can be dull, derivative hacks. It’s not cut-and-dried that the liberal arts are where the creative people are found.

This was so inspiring, and really describes what I’ve come to feel. I went through high school insisting I was too bad at math to get far in it and taking the bare minimum. Fortunately, I developed an interest in data journalism during my first year at the U of M, and ended up getting through Intensive Pre-Calculus, Calculus I, and Calculus II — all necessary to minor in Computer Science.

Without some of my professors urging me on, I would have never attempted this. I was convinced I was bad at math, and it took a lot of hard work to convince myself otherwise.

Jon Drobny

This is true – but nevertheless, going to an engineering school (majoring in Physics) has shown me that not only do most of my peers hate writing, they’re also not particularly good at it. This is probably because my university doesn’t require an entrance essay, but it’s still a worrying trend.

Rukuu

I had the same realisation halfway through an Honors degree. Get on top of the math, or quit. I worked harder than I ever had before, and got on top of it.

I don’t say I’m bad at math, just that I don’t understand it intuitively.

geraldine

Nah, it’s open to you to try to inspire and help people without requiring them to pass tests, etc. Learning, like all forms of creativity, can’t be forced. Try it on yourself; it doesn’t work. The average math-damaged adult on the street will not be able to recall 7 times 8, despite having been ‘drilled’ for many years at school. Yet he will remember intimate details of his childhood toys with no effort, and others who *are* interested can rapidly pick up quite advanced theorems. I guess they’d still use their phones to do arithmetic at the bar, though, arithmetic being fairly boring

Jacob Rideout

Sure – if you teach “math”. Instead we could teach applied problems that just happen to need math. You still need to teach some theory and do the drilling/homework, but if that come about naturally, and in context then the motivation and interest of the median student will be higher.

Sweet63

I did the same…you have to practice between terms. Mostly the advanced algebra seems to help with everything else. Then review the last course… It’s so easy to forget the basic number manipulation. Just imagine how much school kids forget over the summer, and they don’t practice at all usually.

Sweet63

Yep, worked for me. It’s a shame that young insecure kids figure they have to have a CYA attitude and decide they “hate” math before realizing they could get good at it through practice and review.

annmariastat

As someone who has taught math at every level from middle school through PhD students and said exactly this approximately 11,482 times – THANK YOU!

David Mountain

Great story, I am also 37 years old, returning to university to study engineering. Realised I can actually do math – or anything academic – if I put my mind to it, I can succeed. Khan Academy and hard work. Do the problems. Do them again, do more. The only person who holds the keys to your success is yourself.

Lee Dale

I can understand your plight. I am 32 and enrolled on a part time Maths and Physics degree, trying to juggle this with a full time career as a software developer and worries of paying the mortgage etc.

I hated math at school and was rubbish, despite understand some basic math through my software development its daunting but rewarding.

To prepare I have been doing a college algebra course which is great, I’m getting it but it’s hard work. Moving on to pre-calculus and I’m finding it hard to keep up but as you say, hard work and effort pay off and it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve done purely because I never thought I could or would do it.

Trying to fit in studying for my assignments plus learning about university or college math, while living life and working is not easy, take my hat off to anyone who does it.

Love this, Matt. Hard work and trying hard is the key to learning so many things we think are “too hard for us.” I’ve used these excuses about learning a foreign language — and the truth is the same as what you told us here.

I was reminded of a scene in the movie “Good Will Hunting” where Will tells his girlfriend, Skylar, how everything related to mathematics always seemed natural and clear to him, like Beethoven looking at a piano and simply KNOWING what to do with it. It’s a great scene because Skylar (played by Minnie Driver) is smart but nevertheless must work REALLY REALLY HARD to learn things that are easy for Will (Matt Damon).

This reply made me think of the kid who sat behind me in a freshman history class in college. I answered a question from the teacher. The kid leaned forward and whispered (admiringly), “How did you know that?” I whispered back: “It was in the book.”

I have remembered that incident for all these years because it was a revelation to me: He thought I had some special knowledge, when it was nothing special at all.

wndfrm

The small things in math class — the small talk, the “pi vs e” debates, the A4 posters, the Portal-like word problems — they’re underrated. Math functions aren’t vending machines. They’re sources, and math has forgotten that. Math has been boiled down too fiercely. It’s a monster of what arithmetic once was. Math is poorly designed in unis’ concentrated model.

“I am bad at understanding things that poorly present themselves.” That is what i hear today when i see the words, “I’m bad at math”

JeanLuc

Awesome Piece!

I remember in HS hating math and thinking I was not very good at it. But then one day it dawned on me that perhaps I would do better if Instead of telling myself how much I hated it and it sucked, I told myself it was pretty fun and It was not that bad. My grades improved!

Now, that certainly was no magical instant fix. I struggled a lot when I took calculus in HS, but kept working hard and kept getting better. It is still not my best subject, but I can legitimately say I’m pretty good at it, and I think it’s all rather fun!

Also not enough people realise mathematics can be as much of a beautiful art as music or a painting, a hard problem can be as engrossing and fantastic as journey as a good novel… but that could fill an entirely different article.

kshahislove

“working scientists” aren’t the ones who are writing the grants. It is the Principal Investigators who spend all day hustling for grant money to the extent that they have no choice but to become “good” writers. But I think the word persuasive here is better.

Hans Wisbrun (Wisc)

Hear, hear, hear! Tell me what grade you got at the end and I’ll send you my Choco-pi as a reward!

Depends on the lab. The PI of our lab spends at least half her time at the bench or analyzing her own data. About half the labs in our department are small enough that the PI does a significant amount of the work. Once you get up over maybe half a dozen members in the lab, the PI becomes purely a manager in most cases.

So, random data point: i went to a British-curriculum high school in the far East, and you didn’t get out of there and go on to university without basic calculus (as well as algebra, geometry, trigonometry, the works). The American students who came into the school were universally poorly prepared in math, and the students who came up through the British system always marveled at how the Americans could have escaped so much of it. I’d have to go back and re-take everything now, but I was always grateful that it got de-mystified for me then. I needed stats for both my MBA and my urban planning degree, and somehow I managed to squeak through both, largely thanks to my high school curriculum. We should be insisting on more of that at the high-school level, IMHO.

Skeptic

So this whole post could be summed up as “Just try harder”. The chorus I heard throughout my youth. There’s opportunity costs to consider. Study math or drink wine and watch TV is a false choice. The question is what must a person sacrifice in order to achieve proficiency? Is that sacrifice worth it?

cm

Children are inherently interested in arithmetic: how far is it? Does she have more than me? How many can I have? How much longer? The teaching of arithmetic is, in most school systems, very poor, killing the kids’ inherent fascination with quantities. This is mostly because the teachers themselves don’t understand what they are teaching (or why), often because they themselves are math-phobic (and then they pass their phobia along to their students!). Li Ping Ma’s “Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics” yields excellent insights about how poorly prepared and inadequately educated our elementary teachers are.

Mike

Good point. Math isn’t something you can study in your spare time and become proficient. OK, you can if you’re the author of the post, who already had a well paid job and free math classes in the same building he worked. But most of us have to study another bunch of things, learn idioms, new software.. I feel overwhelmed sometimes because when I start to understand something I already have to make room in my brain for more things coming. Nowadays everybody has to be a specialist, an expert in lots of topics. And it’s not about a culture of tv and sofa, is not that we don’t try harder anymore. This excessive demanding never happened before, it’s exhausting, it drains your brain and soul and nobody says a thing about it.

aashit13

No help. No significant idea. Hard work in anything will get you to the top.
And most can’t do that . I hate math because I just can’t solve questions. I am not super weak at it but I can’t withstand the agony of not being able to solve the problem

Jason Christian

Engineers and scientists may not have the most flowery writing, but it is concise, relevant to the thesis, and makes brand new (read difficult) concepts easy to understand for those with an informal training in the field.

Erik Gibson

I seriously wish everyone I know could read this. Everyone in America should read this, for that matter.

Manish kumar verma

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brself

But you might develop better intuition with time and practice.

deliberatelybarren

Thank you for this article, you have really touched a nerve. I wonder if you and others who were ‘bad’ at mathematics felt, as I do, that something important was missing in your life? I think we don’t need it just for our jobs but also for understanding our place in the world/universe. Or something.

Waite, M. (2013, Nov. 13). Matt Waite: How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math. Nieman Journalism Lab. Retrieved August 18, 2017, from http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/matt-waite-how-i-faced-my-fears-and-learned-to-be-good-at-math/

Chicago

Waite, Matt. "Matt Waite: How I faced my fears and learned to be good at math." Nieman Journalism Lab. Last modified November 13, 2013. Accessed August 18, 2017. http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/11/matt-waite-how-i-faced-my-fears-and-learned-to-be-good-at-math/.